1. Field
The invention generally relates to finding temporal demographics of anonymous mobile users at different locations and, more specifically, the methods of estimating aggregated temporal demographics of any community of mobile users at any location by aggregating short location sequences (hereafter known as tracks) from individual anonymized users.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, the number of mobile and portable computing devices has increased dramatically, and at the same time the number of location-aware applications for such devices has exploded.
Location-based services (LBS) is an emerging area of mobile applications that leverages the ability of new devices to calculate their current geographic positions and report them to a user or to a service. Examples of these services range from obtaining local weather, traffic updates, and driving directions to child trackers, buddy finders and urban concierge services. These new location-aware devices rely on a variety of technologies that all use the same general concept to generate location information. By measuring radio signals originating from known reference points, these devices can mathematically calculate the user's position relative to these reference points.